Well Spring of Memory: Chautauqua Workshop with Roy Hoffman

Here is the first of the pieces that I wrote for the Well Spring of Memory workshop.  It was a great privilege and even more fun to have Roy Hoffman as the workshop leader. 

Apple Butter

               Esther looked down on the glossy, brown head of her granddaughter who was prattling on about knowing where babies came from.  Her five-year old self-importance was amusing but she knew that her daughter-in-law needed a brief respite from the demands of the two older children as she entered the last few days of her third pregnancy.  So she had offered to take Elizabeth back to the bungalow across in the other compound so that Elizabeth could join her grandfather for a cup of “coffee” when he came back to the house after his morning surgery schedule.

               As they entered the bungalow with its large, dark rooms,  Esther called to the cook to put the water on to boil for the morning coffee.  It was an unnecessary reminder as she and Joshua had a break for coffee every morning at around 9:30.  She stopped beside the kerosene refrigerator and took out the pitcher of milk, seeing that the cream had risen to the top.  She would skim it off and make some butter after they had their coffee together.

               Glancing at her hand as she gripped the pitcher handle she remembered the many hours she had spent milking cows as a girl in Ohio.  How distant and how near that memory was.  Her childhood on the farm near New Knoxville had been poor preparation for this strange land where she had raised her three boys.  It was October now and her sister and brothers would be bringing in the corn crop, would be splitting wood and gathering in apples from the orchard.   They always cooked up a huge kettle of apple butter over the fire pit behind the barn because there was no other way to use the bountiful harvest of apples.  She could smell the smoke and see her mother, rotund and barely tall enough to stir the ladle around and around in the kettle.  Her job had been to keep stoking the fire, pushing logs into the pit below.

               Fall was her favorite time of year with the leaves changing color, the days shortening, and the cool crisp temperatures foretelling of the real cold and snow to come.   There was no discernable fall in central India, although the scorching heat of summer and relentless wet of the monsoon would end there were none of the signs she yearned to see.

               She had known she would follow Joshua wherever he went, was bewitched by his great sense of adventure, his deep conviction that his skill as surgeon was God’s gift that was to be shared in the world, not in Minnesota or Ohio, but where there were souls to be saved, as a witness to Jesus commandment to love.  She did not know that it would mean sending her children far away to school; that she would know loneliness that seemed to have no cure.

               “Grandma, can I have a cookie?”

               She looked down at Elizabeth’s inquiring face.  At least she had her beloved son and his family near-by.  She had learned to make the unfamiliar and strange a place with ritual and routine that would pass for home.

               “Yes, you may have a cookie but save the one with jam for grandpa.”